In London Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin attended St. Mary’s College.
Gallery of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
Brook Green, Hammersmith, London W6 7BS, UK
Cecilia spent her senior high school years at St Paul’s Girls’ School in London.
Gallery of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
Sidgwick Ave, Cambridge CB3 9DF, UK
At age 19, in September 1919, Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin began studying for a botany degree at Cambridge’s Newnham College.
Gallery of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
In the fall of 1923, age 23, Cecilia Payne arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Financed by a Harvard Observatory fellowship for women, she affiliated with Radcliffe College, a women’s college that is now part of Harvard University.
Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
In the fall of 1923, age 23, Cecilia Payne arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Financed by a Harvard Observatory fellowship for women, she affiliated with Radcliffe College, a women’s college that is now part of Harvard University.
(This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible.
(Ms Gaposchkin was one of giants of astronomy and astro ph...)
Ms Gaposchkin was one of giants of astronomy and astro physics in the early part of the twentieth century, and this book was her attempt to gather it all up, distill it down, and write something for intelligent laypeople. This book ranked as a classic on the day it came out.
(One of the leading astronomers of the 1960s proposed in h...)
One of the leading astronomers of the 1960s proposed in her Ph.D. thesis an explanation for the composition of stars in terms of the relative abundances of hydrogen and helium. This book expands on that thesis.
(A summing up by one of the greatest of modern astronomers...)
A summing up by one of the greatest of modern astronomers, this book assesses the state of our knowledge of the processes of development in stars and galaxies. The author's historical introduction shows how the modern picture of the universe sprang from the pioneer work of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, Shapley's study of globular clusters, and Hubble's attack on the galaxies.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was a British-born American astronomer who discovered that stars are made mainly of hydrogen and helium and established that stars could be classified according to their temperatures. Within a few years a major paradigm shift took place and Payne’s discovery became mainstream science.
Background
Cecilia Helena Payne was born on May 10, 1900 into an upper-class family in the market town of Wendover, England. Her father was the multi-faceted Edward John Payne – talented musician, fellow of Oxford University, author of major histories, and latterly a barrister and judge. He drowned in a canal when Cecilia was four. Before this, he gave his daughter a love of music, playing scales to her from age two so she developed perfect pitch. Cecilia remembered him filling their home with music and fun. Her mother was Emma Leonora Helena née Pertz, a skilled artist, who came from an academically accomplished German family. A rather stern woman, Cecilia’s mother raised her three children alone. All were very young when her husband died – Cecilia was the eldest.
Education
Cecilia’s mother made sure her children were well-educated. At age eight, Cecilia decided to become a scientist when walking in an orchard she recognized a plant she had previously known only from her mother’s description of it – the bee orchid. At age six, Cecilia began attending a small girls’ school across the street from her home in Wendover. It was run by Miss Elizabeth Edwards, who told her classes that women were the stronger sex. Cecilia learned to read and became an avid reader. There were frequent exercises in mental arithmetic.
By the time she left this small school, Cecilia had learned basic Latin and could speak French and German. She had studied geometry, could do algebra up to the level of quadratic equations, and had been taught how to use a chemical balance. At home she became a skilled pianist. At age 12, Cecilia moved reluctantly with her family to London. Previously accustomed to the freedom of living in a small town with plenty of space and nearby fields and hills, she hated the big, smoky city.
In London she attended St. Mary’s College, but found it inferior to the little school in Wendover. She felt there were far too many church services, leaving less time for other subjects: there was no science for a year; German was not taught; and her favorite subject – mathematics – was a whole year behind. Cecilia studied calculus and coordinate geometry on her own. Just before her seventeenth birthday her school told her it could do no more for her and asked her to leave.
Cecilia spent her senior high school years at St Paul’s Girls’ School in London. It was everything she could have hoped for. She was positively encouraged to love science and was taught music by the famous composer Gustav Holst – the first man she said more than just a few words to since her father’s death over a decade earlier. She played in the school’s orchestra and Holst taught her to conduct. He urged Cecilia to become a musician, but her heart was set on becoming a scientist.
Celia Payne’s ambition was to study science at the University of Cambridge. With no money for this, she needed to win a full scholarship. Fortunately she achieved this formidable objective, winning the only scholarship generous enough to cover all her costs. At age 19, in September 1919, she began studying for a botany degree at Cambridge’s Newnham College. She insisted on studying the physics course – an unusual choice for a would-be botanist, but Ernest Rutherford was in charge of the Cavendish Laboratory and Payne wanted to attend the great man’s lectures. The lectures she attended on the quantized Bohr atom were given by Niels Bohr in person.
She decided to major in physics and also started attending astronomy lectures. She pored over astronomy books avidly and after making some astronomical observations she approached Eddington, who was happy to give her research work to carry out on an informal basis. This led to her writing a paper on the proper motion of stars, published by the Royal Astronomical Society.
She spent many days and nights working on astronomy projects when she really ought to have been studying physics. She left Cambridge with a second class honors degree rather than a first. The degree was not awarded officially – it was only in 1947 that the University of Cambridge began awarding degrees to women. After learning that the only career option open to her in her own country was teaching in girls’ schools, she decided to go to America to study for a doctorate and become an astronomer.
In the fall of 1923, age 23, Cecilia Payne arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Financed by a Harvard Observatory fellowship for women, she affiliated with Radcliffe College, a women’s college that is now part of Harvard University. She lived in a shared room in Radcliffe’s graduate dormitory. Harold Shapley, Harvard Observatory’s director was her doctoral supervisor. Payne had first met him in London where he had made a great impression on her with his lecture on ‘The Universe.’ Shapley soon introduced Payne to her external Ph.D. advisor, the renowned astronomer Henry Norris Russell of Princeton University. It took only two years for Payne to be awarded a Ph.D. for one of the most remarkable theses ever written by an astronomy student.
Payne-Gaposchkin’s career at Harvard began in 1925, when she was given an ambiguous staff position at the Harvard Observatory. By that time she had already published six papers on her research in the field of stellar atmospheres. In 1926, when she was twenty-six years old, Payne-Gaposchkin became the youngest scientist to be listed in the American Men of Science. But her position at Harvard Observatory remained unacknowledged and unofficial. It was not until 1938 that her work as a lecturer and researcher was recognized and she was granted the title of astronomer, which she later requested to be changed to Phillips Astronomer.
From 1925 until 1938 she was considered a technical assistant to Shapley, and none of the courses she taught were listed in the Harvard catalogue until 1945. Finally, in 1956 when her colleague Donald Menzel replaced Shapley as director of the Harvard Observatory, Payne-Gaposchkin was “promoted” to professor, given an appropriate salary, and named chair of the Department of Astronomy — the first woman to hold a position at Harvard University that was not expressly designated for a woman.
Payne-Gaposchkin’s years at Harvard remained productive despite her scant recognition. She devoted a large part of her research to the study of stellar magnitudes and distances. Following her 1934 marriage to Gaposchkin, a Russian emigre astronomer, the couple pioneered research into variable stars (stars whose luminosity fluctuates), including research on the structure of the Milky Way and the nearby galaxies known as the Magellanic Clouds. Through their studies they made over two million magnitude estimates of the variable stars in the Magellanic Clouds.
From the 1920s until Payne-Gaposchkin’s death, she published over 150 papers and several monographs, including “The Stars of High Luminosity” (1930), a virtual encyclopedia of astrophysics, and Variable Stars (1938), a standard reference book of astronomy written with her husband. She also published four books in the 1950s on the subject of stars and stellar evolution. Moreover, though she retired from her academic post at Harvard in 1966, becoming emeritus professor at Harvard University the following year, she continued to write and conduct research until her death. Her autobiography, writings collected after her death by her daughter, Katherine Haramundanis, is titled Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections and was published in 1984. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin died in her sleep, age 79, of lung cancer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 7, 1979.
Achievements
Payne-Gaposchkin was the most eminent female astronomer of her time, the first to be appointed full professor at Harvard University, and the first to chair a department. She was the first to apply the laws of atomic physics to the study of the temperature and density of stellar bodies and to conclude that hydrogen and helium, the two lightest elements, were also the two most common elements in the universe. While she is perhaps best known for her later work in identifying and measuring variable stars with her husband, Sergei I. Gaposchkin, Payne-Gaposchkin helped forge a path for other women in the sciences through her staunch fight against sexual discrimination at Harvard College Observatory.
In 1934 Payne-Gaposchkin received the Annie J. Cannon Prize for significant contributions to astronomy from the American Astronomical Society. She won the Award of Merit from Radcliffe College in 1952, the Rittenhouse Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1961, and was the first woman to receive the Henry Norris Russell Prize of the American Astronomical Society in 1976. In 1977 the minor planet 1974 CA was named Payne-Gaposchkin in her honor.
Payne used the spectral lines of many different elements and the work of Indian astrophysicist Meghnad Saha, who had discovered an equation relating the ionization states of an element in a star to the temperature to definitively establish that the spectral sequence did correspond to quantifiable stellar temperatures. Payne also determined that stars are composed mostly of hydrogen and helium.
Quotations:
“An admission of ignorance may well be a step to a new discovery.”
“His word could make or break a young scientist. It was my good fortune to receive the stamp of approval in the beginning, though he vetoed some of my cherished ideas.”
“I heard tell that Miss Leavitt’s lamp was still to be seen burning in the night, that her spirit still haunted the plate stacks. I suspect that some credulous soul (and there were such in those days) had seen me from afar, burning the midnight oil.”
“The reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or understand something.”
“The fact that so many stars have identical spectra is in itself a fact suggesting uniformity of composition; and the success of the theory of thermal ionization in predicting the spectral changes that occur from class to class is a further indication in the same direction.”
Membership
Payne-Gaposchkin was elected to the Royal Astronomical Society while she was a student at Cambridge in 1923, and the following year she was granted membership in the American Astronomical Society. In 1936 she was elected to membership of the American Philosophical Society.
Personality
Payne-Gaposchkin is remembered as a woman of boundless enthusiasm who refused to give up her career at a time when married women with children were expected to do so; she once shocked her superiors by giving a lecture when she was five months pregnant.
Quotes from others about the person
The most important previous determination of the abundance of the elements by astrophysical means is that by Miss Payne, who determined… the relative abundance of eighteen of the most important elements. [Comparing our results gives] a very gratifying agreement, especially when it is considered Miss Payne’s results were determined by a different theoretical method, with instruments of a quite different type… and even on different bodies.” - Henry Russell
Connections
In 1933, Cecilia Helena Payne met the Russian astrophysicist Sergei Gaposchkin in Germany. They married in 1934 and set up home in Lexington, Massachusetts. At first they communicated entirely in German because it was the only language they were both fluent in. Following their marriage most of their research work was carried out jointly. They had three children: Katherine and Peter became astronomers; Edward became a neurosurgeon.
